Willard Van Orman Quine
Our statements about the world face experience not one by one but as a corporate body: none is immune from revision.
Life
Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000), born in Akron (Ohio), taught at Harvard for over thirty years. A logician and philosopher, he criticised the distinction between truths of meaning and truths of fact ('Two Dogmas of Empiricism', 1951), defended a naturalism in which philosophy continues science, and held that our beliefs form a revisable web. He matters for questions of truth and knowledge.
Main works
Essays on existence, meaning and the critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction.
Argues for the indeterminacy of translation: several translation manuals can fit the same verbal behaviour.
Contains 'Epistemology Naturalized', which makes the theory of knowledge a chapter of psychology.
In his own words
« The Humean predicament is the human predicament. »
« Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about. »
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceAll knowledge ultimately rests on sensory experience; he rejects the idea of truths known independently of experience.
Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951)
No belief is immune from revision: our beliefs form a web that faces experience as a whole.
Quine, Epistemology Naturalized (1969)
He is a physicalist: only physical things and events exist, and mental talk must fit in that picture.
Quine, Word and Object (1960)